Making It Easy For ISPs To Offer WiFi
Billing Concepts has announced their eZ-Wi offering, which they say will let ISPs offer their customers the ability to use various fee-based WiFi hotspots, while signing on with their own login and having it billed to their regular ISP bill. The idea sounds good, but implementation raises some questions. First, you’re throwing (uh oh) yet another middleman into the picture. In every analysis of fee-based hotspots, you begin to realize that there are so many fingers reaching in for a piece of the pie that it’s nearly impossible to offer for-fee WiFi without charging amounts that users will never agree to. Also, the way this is set up, eZ-Wi has to go out and establish the relationships with both the hotspot providers and the ISPs. Many of the bigger hotspot providers out there are already looking to do (or have done) deals with ISPs already. If they can sign a bunch of deals, then this might be worth looking at, but since they just announced a product by itself, it looks like it has a pretty steep hill to climb.
